


the heart's deceit

by oceansinmychest



Category: The Handmaid's Tale (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Art History, Banter, Blasphemy, Breathplay, Canon Compliant, Choking, Dreams vs. Reality, F/F, Inspired by Art, Mirror effect, One Shot, Poetry, Serena Joy talks in her sleep, Sexual Tension, Strangling, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Unresolved Tension, dark themes, prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-02-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:48:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22888105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oceansinmychest/pseuds/oceansinmychest
Summary: In the dark of the night, Offred creeps into Serena Joy's resting place with the intent to inflict damage.
Relationships: June Osborne | Offred/Serena Joy Waterford
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30





	the heart's deceit

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes, when I spend far too much time in a gallery or museum, I get inspired. Listening to Mother Mother & Zola Jesus' work on repeat helped too. ;p
> 
> Title comes from Jeremiah 17:9 in ESV. 
> 
> I've decided not to place this fic within any of the seasons of THT, though I suppose it would fit someplace in the second season, if my hand was forced. 
> 
> As a forewarning, June chokes Serena, but doesn't kill her. Please proceed with caution and take care of yourselves.
> 
> Enjoy and happy reading!

> "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?"
> 
> **Jeremiah 17:9**

In a land where repentance is sought and bought, a drab draft sweeps through a poorly insulated home reclaimed and repurposed by the ruinous Waterfords. In a house divided, she’s as cool as winter or the evening tide, sentenced to sleep alone. Fred takes to another bed when he isn’t conducting his dalliances at the brothel alongside the other Commanders. They think she doesn’t know, they think themselves powerful. How weak they are.

Heretics taint and sully a place intended to be paradise. It’s hard to say that this is holy, Gilead fell far from the cry.

Built like a sturdy cathedral, her pose resembles a maiden fast asleep in a Baroque painting. She rests on her back, negligent towards the pain in her screaming spine, her forearm daintily draped across her creased forehead. The provocation of her blonde hair streamlined across the flat pillow, once teeming with life, now caves from the pressure. A few loose strands collect on the pillowcase, a reminder of Serena Joy Waterford’s humanity, or, what’s left of it. Her nightgown rubs against her body, clings to her tall, thin form to reveals drapery folds befitting a marble statue. Lysippos would be proud of those proportions.

In favor of somber sleep, the wax trickling down the candle stops mid-movement, frozen in stasis while perched atop the nightstand. No flame surges to illuminate the contemplative room. A matchbook yawns to reveal a row of missing teeth. A wilted rose in a glass vase loses another petal, writhing on the ground, now crushed beneath a steady heel.

While barefoot, June Osborne pads across the wooden floor with purpose, careful not to make a sound. Silently, with sick intent, she crawls into the queen-sized bed. June names the reverent body of Serena Joy Waterford as a gilded throne, claims her as an unoccupied pew. She perches atop her trim, lithe waist. Straddling for the slaughter, her thumbs press against the chords forming Serena’s pretty, taut throat.

What makes her whole? What makes her holy?

Serena ought to loathe Offred for the fruit she bears.

Here, Serena behaves akin to a tortured saint. She whispers prayers into the scratchy blanket of darkness, murmurs a lonely “please” that’s as faint as the waves coming to claim the shore. She dreams of a gallery; she dreams of Gauguin. _The Vision after the Sermon_ (1888) stares back. Jacob writhes on the ground with an angel and all the surrounding women throw themselves into prayer. In her foolish rest, June comes to her. Sneaks up on her. A pair of strong arms, capable of raising many a babe, encompass her mid-section. She feels secure, right, never as wrong as she does when Fred tries his best to dance and romance.

June Osborne has met the butcher and lives to tell the tale. Hell, she’s damned no matter what. This is her rage-filled revenge.

_O Comala, come._

Short of breath, Serena gasps. She stirs awake, lips chapped and craving a cigarette - an inhalation of sweet, toxic contraband. She bites her mouth, chews on dead skin, only to notice the stern, persistent weight that sits on her chest.

June grips her neck. It’s a shame Serena doesn’t beg. Her thumb probes the underside of her jaw, her mind entertaining countless hypothetical scenarios.

Rather than awaking with a start, her lashes flutter. She blinks herself awake. Groggy and heated, Serena Joy resembles not a princess, but a fairy tale queen who risked all her ambitions for some higher power. June conveys a New Testament benevolence despite the Old Testament wrath channeled within her icy stare.

“Come for your pound of flesh?” Serena inquires, a crooked grin a fleeting vision.

Confined to a Sisyphus myth, Serena doesn’t bother making a violent start. Her abdomen clenches as she attempts to rise, only to fall back onto the tainted marital bed. Instead, she recoils with the efficiency of a loaded gun. Her eyes water; in the unholy light, they glisten. The slope of her bare shoulder in the moonlight. June would grant Serena no clemency, no peace.

Despite all her delusions, she grows unbearably still. Serena Joy chokes on her bloody words. Wheezing, Serena clutches her throat. Pines for a cigarette to take off the edge, to soothe her aching spirit and calm her raw throat. June pats her arm away with a scorpion sting.

“I should kill you,” June whispers as a promise, a threat, a mournful regret.

“You should,” she agrees, compliant given the circumstance despite the need to buck her hips to gain the upper-hand.

Maybe that’s her penchant for self-destruction talking, once buried when America was dead and now resurfaced since her sense of purpose has become a ghost.

Confined to a kingdom she’s not allowed to rule, she learns to keep quiet. Stubborn to a fault, as learned from her valorous Aunt Joan, Serena doesn’t call to a Martha for help. Instead, she lets June sink onto her, those threats containing a wealth of meaning.

June savors the feel of that fluttering pulse. 

“I won’t turn you into a martyr, Serena; you’re undeserving of the role.”

Her words come across as a volatile hiss, spoken with obscene conviction and a hint of spit.

Swallowing the beliefs of a dusty, old tome, the fervent and the irreverent come together where all the secrets and half-truths are buried. Pulled into the eye of a savage storm, the sheets form minuscule whirlpools. It is overwhelming to be known, to be seen, and in the suffocating presence of a perfect saboteur, Serena’s gaze never wavers.

“You don’t answer to God,” she rasps, the terror in her steely stare fading with each painfully still moment.

“No,” June concludes after wetting her lips, flicking her tongue out in a serpentine fashion, shifting the brunt of her weight. “But _you_ do, Serena.”

Yes, Serena **deserves** this form of penance. She ought to retreat to her house on fire, the burn would be a lesson as much as a cure. Her hands clutch the sheets, as if she’s about to bare the white flag of surrender, but she can’t stomach the thought. May the sword of Michael grant her some small mercy. 

Looking at her porcelain skin, June wonders when Serena will crack - first cracked, the two are mutually indistinguishable. From a fairytale strangulation to a ritualistic beheading, it should be easy to kill Serena. There is no banding together here. How often they find themselves hopelessly entwined, caught in a state of entanglement. They should have Holoferne's head and prolong Herod's evil illness rather than resort to agony and antagonistic ways.

Here and now, they grapple like old, wrathful gods. Beneath June, Serena grows still, ever watchful. Her struggling ceases as a wife past her prime. Initially hesitant to touch, Serena seizes hold of June’s thigh. The feel of muscle, body and warmth grounds her though the volatile act borders heresy. June’s blunt, ragged nails prick at her temples, her scalp, bestowing her with a metaphorical crown of thorns. How many times has she contemplated curbing her hunger by feeding from the hand of an exposed charlatan?

Serena’s no Personal Jesus; rather, she resembles a false god preaching blasphemy on the pedestal of a statue depicting idolatry, crumbling due to its forgotten nature. Nothing in this goddamned house **belongs** to her.

The handmaid’s presence feels like a tourniquet – restrictive, constrictive, crushing until the weight of Serena Joy’s sins are too much to bear. The intimacy of a shared stare procures a startling mirror effect. Cool indifference is carried away by a blanket of fire, the wanting goes unsaid.

When her breath hitches, her body burns. She wears the purest shade of white, gossamer caressing and holding her so sweetly.

Although June bares her teeth, it doesn’t make her ugly. On the contrary, it makes her more real, more present.

June’s unconquerable will holds her down, hold her under, as is the way of the baptism. All they’re missing is the decorative font and some seraphic hymns. June tethers her body to Serena’s as an extension like a limb, a contract, or a befuddling understanding.

Panic fades away into oblivion. That state of hyper-vigilance dissipates. Serena Joy takes deep, steady breaths. The captor becomes the captive. Annihilated, desecrated by the fistful of hair, chiaroscuro blesses the scene like a Caravaggio painting. No one’s slaying Holofernes. Not now, not yet.

Did fifty pieces of silver thrust them into this predicament? 

Nothing fills the profound emptiness stirring from within. Just another holy fool, being a woman is synonymous with a gnawing, frantic hunger. She stiffens whilst great discomfort washes, battling a flaring heat down below. Serena shaped this new gory (glory) world. It’s easy to vilify, to play the blame game. Contempt simmers in a state of constant malaise. Yes, she deserves this and far worse, but June provides mercy.

She accepts the guillotine weight of hands upon her throat, her frosty stare devouring June’s cupid bow, dwelling on a kiss certain to never exist. Paralyzed, she tastes her sweetened breath. Smells it too.

Damn her for leaning up, as if June is her maker, as if June will grant her some sense of fulfillment.

“Why ask for forgiveness?” Serena Joy probes with a ghost of a smile.

Melodrama accompanies her monologue. These quietly sung confessions vow to die alongside the night.

Sometimes, June wonders if Serena is more machine than woman; it would make this brutal act easier. 

They say that the highest form of killing is born from devotion.

(Who the hell thought of that?)

Exalted breath slithers out like plumes of cigarette smoke. Here, in the stress of the situation at hand, Serena Joy craves her sworn-off vice. She clutches Joan’s sturdy thigh, her nails grazing the sliver of skin beneath the gown that rises ever higher.

The impact leaves her shaken. June’s hair spills forward, a crushing tide of blonde, a curtain that Serena yearns to drown in, if only to cherish her scent. She wants to grab a fistful and allow herself to choke in the cloud of June’s perfume, faded alongside the summer day.

Her nails prick and tickle Serena’s palm, not quite leaving behind a stigmata. She pins her wrists down, not quite holding her hands.

In quiet fury, June leaves Serena to pine, to **crave** , to twist in the sheets that swallow her up like Jonah. Unable to fall back asleep, her reddened throat throbs, and Serena laughs into her hands with bruises under her wanton eyes. Never has she felt so fucking _alive_.


End file.
